us breeze
aloft, the furrow, the foam, the sparkle that track the rushing keel!
They have escaped the dangers of the wave, and lie still henceforth,
evermore. Happiest of souls, if lethargy is bliss, and palsy the chief
beatitude!

America owes its political freedom to religious Protestantism. But
political freedom is reacting on religious prescription with still
mightier force. We wonder, therefore, when we find a soul which was
born to a full sense of individual liberty, an unchallenged right
of self-determination on every new alleged truth offered to its
intelligence, voluntarily surrendering any portion of its liberty to
a spiritual dictatorship which always proves to rest, in the last
analysis, on _a majority vote_, nothing more nor less, commonly an old
one, passed in those barbarous times when men cursed and murdered each
other for differences of opinion, and of course were not in a condition
to settle the beliefs of a comparatively civilized community.

In our disgust, we are liable to be intolerant. We forget that weakness
is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our
most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity. Who of us
does not look with great tenderness on the young chieftain in the "Fair
Maid of Perth," when he confesses his want of courage? All of us love
companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us
are more or less imaginative in our theology. Some of us may find the
aid of material symbols a comfort, if not a necessity. The boldest
thinker may have his moments of languor and discouragement, when he
feels as if he could willingly exchange faiths with the old beldame
crossing herself at the cathedral-door,--nay, that, if he could drop
all coherent thought, and lie in the flowery meadow with the brown-eyed
solemnly unthinking cattle, looking up to the sky, and all their simple
consciousness staining itself blue, then down to the grass, and life
turning to a mere greenness, blended with confused scents of herbs,--no
individual mind-movement such as men are teased with, but the great
calm cattle-sense of all time and all places that know the milky smell
of herds,--if he could be like these, he would be content to be driven
home by the cow-boy, and share the grassy banquet of the king of ancient
Babylon. Let us be very generous, then, in our judgment of those
who leave the front ranks of thought for the company of the meek
non-combatants who